Seminar Abstract

Cynthia Chen, UW Civil and Environmental Engineering

"From sightings to trajectories: How well can we guess activity
locations from mobile phone sightings?"

Time:

12:30 pm on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013

Place:

Savery 409

Passively generated mobile phone dataset is emerging as a new
data source for research in human mobility patterns. Information on
people’s trajectories is not directly available from such dataset; they
must be inferred. Many questions remain in terms how well we can capture
human mobility patterns from such dataset. Only one study has compared
the results from a mobile phone dataset to those from the National
Household Travel Survey (NHTS), though the comparison is on two
different populations and samples. This study constitutes one of the
first, if not the first, study that systematically validates the results
from a mobile phone dataset against the ground truth. Clearly, more
studies of the same type are needed. The findings reported are
promising. The distribution of the activity locations identified from
the simulation dataset resembles the true distribution quite well and
the majority of the home and work places are correctly identified,
within a relatively short distance from the true ones. These results
point to the tremendous potential that these passively generated mobile
phone datasets may supplement or even replace household travel surveys
in the future.